Yielding
by ICanStopAnytime
Summary: Sun can only restrain her emotions for so long.
1. Chapter 1

She had watched him dig Shannon's grave too. The quiet, prickling emotion she had felt then was nothing like the flood that engulfed her spirit now. Back then, she had felt the tiny tentacles of guilt irritating a soul that was otherwise soaring. She had just been reunited with Jin, and she could feel his hard, smooth flesh beneath her slender arms as she watched Sayid strike the earth with his makeshift shovel.

Jin's well-sculpted back was warm against her chest as she stood embracing him just outside the tent where they had re-lived the passion of their first night together. The happiness that had surprised her that night and pursued her into the morning was marred by the sight of Sayid preparing to bury his own happiness. Her heart was still beating hard within her chest, and her mind was still reeling with the delight of the prior evening, when she heard the painful crunching of the earth and was forced to turn her eyes toward the sound. Her joy had felt suddenly like a stolen jewel.

It seemed the earth had groaned loudly, then, beneath the thrust of Sayid's shovel. But now it gave way too easily, she thought. The Iraqi's calm, deliberate efforts were enough to turn the dirt. Where was the rage that had driven his arms then? Where was the earth that had so stubbornly resisted the possibility of taking one more body into its depths? Why did the ground yield so easily now?

She watched Sayid strike the shovel upright in a lightly colored, half-turned clod. He wiped the sweat leisurely from his brow with the back of his arm. She had brought him water when he had dug Shannon's grave; she had hoped the quiet act of kindness would not seem intrusive and that it would allay her guilt. He had refused refreshment then, but he did not refuse the bottle Sawyer extended to him now. The water dribbled out of the side of his lips as he downed it greedily. He lowered the half-drained bottle to his side and glanced up at the lone Korean standing at the edge of the grave. His face was as quiet and as unrevealing as hers had been then. And he was just as silent.

Sayid rested the bottle on the earth, picked up the shovel, and rejoined Sawyer in hollowing out the void that would welcome Jin's body.


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter Two**

Jin had gone with Sayid, Locke, and a half dozen others to rescue the captured trio. The mission had been no ocean cruise; neither Sayid nor Jin would hear of Sun accompanying them for the dangerous search and rescue attempt, not with a child in her womb. Her own insistence that she join the journey had been only half-hearted anyway. She had been stronger in her plea for Jin to remain behind, but she had relented just as she saw her husband prepare to yield. She had seen the softness in his eyes, the fear of angering her, the wounded resignation. Yet she had seen deeper than those eyes: she had known he believed he would betray his friends by staying; she had perceived his unspoken feeling of emasculation, and in the end she had not wanted a man who would choose subjugation over honor. So she had let her last protest die on her lips, and she had let him go. But now, she thought, even the shell of the man would be preferable to this yawning isolation.

They hadn't wrapped the body this time. Tarps were growing scarce, and Sawyer and Sayid had covered the corpse swiftly with nothing but earth. The funeral seemed perfunctory. The wind blew the dark strands of Sun's hair across eyes that were too dry and lips that were too numb. She sensed rather than saw the survivors file out past her.

The hands that rested briefly on her shoulder irritated her flesh. Their conciliatory touches felt as if each passing person had simply shrugged. What was one more death now? The funeral goers had done their duty. They had stood at the covered grave. They had waited awkwardly for someone to speak, and they had nodded mechanically as Jack filled the silence with mundane recitation of the ways Jin had served them all. The doctor's short speech, as far as she heard it, had boiled down to something like, "He was a swell guy. He fished for us."

A fisherman. Was that how he would be remembered? Was that all? He had been a prop to her when the fear crept in at night; an anchor when chaos closed around the camp; a conduit for the secrets she had too long kept. He was a shoulder to lean on, a hand to hold, a lover, a husband, and a friend.

Sayid was the last to walk by. He did not attempt to touch her. Perhaps he remembered too keenly how sensitive the skin became once the heart was laid in the grave, how irksome the strained affection of a crowd that would push past mourning. There was no time here on this island. No covered dishes in the kitchen, no voices conversing in the living room late into the night, no voices dying into soft whispers in the nearby hall, no neighbors dropping by for days after, no ritual, no relief. There was only life moving mercilessly forward, survival eked out day after day on the shores and in the jungle.

Sun remained alone beside the grave.


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter Three**

Sun couldn't recall how she survived that first night. She knew she had not slept. She emerged from the tent early in the morning, but not any earlier than Kate, who was creeping out of Jack's shelter with a wide smile on her face, a smile she could barely force into a straight line when she caught Sun's hollow eyes.

Sun did not know precisely what had happened in the camp of the Others. She had seen the search party return bearing a stretcher; she had seen the last of life slip away from her husband, and all curiosity had seemed idle then. She had not asked questions, but she had heard the gossip, of course, gossip of cages, of a human zoo, of Others who stood outside the bars with clipboards, filling reams of paper with notes about primitive mating rituals. The party had come back with the captive trio and with a handful of children who had been the forced prodigies of the Others. The fabled love triangle had been fractured, and Kate had made her choice—for now.

Sun watched Kate, who was no longer fighting her smile, retreat across the sand. Once again a new happiness had arisen to eclipse a decaying one. Sun could neither justify nor repress her growing resentment. All the numbness of the prior day now yielded to a swell of emotion, stronger than any wave that crashed against the constant shore.

It was not supposed to be this way. She was supposed to remain stone faced, as her father had when her sister died. She was supposed to restrain herself, as her brother had when his wife died. She was supposed to press the rising rage down, down deep into some sealed compartment of her soul. She was not supposed to begin pacing across the sand looking to make someone feel the pain she was feeling.

She ripped the flap of Sayid's tent open. He was dressed and looked as though he was just preparing to walk out. Sun saw the flash of anger in his eyes that rose because someone had dared to intrude into the tent he had built for Shannon. She saw him bury the instinctive emotion as quickly as it was born.

She took two steps forward and shoved him hard with the palms of her hands. He seemed less surprised by her unexpected anger than by her sudden strength. "Why did you fail to protect him?" she screamed. "You promised you would bring him back alive!"

"I promised I would _try_."

She grabbed at the neck of his shirt. She wanted to scratch the skin beneath it, to make him bleed. He wrapped her hand with his own and held it motionless. "Sun--"

She fought against his grip, stepped back, and pushed him again, but he did not react to her force this time. She saw the softness in his eyes, and she despised his pity. She wanted to slap it from his face. And so she did.

He did not raise his hand to his cheek to feel the red welt. Instead he ran his tongue inside his mouth and watched her guardedly. "Why me?" he asked. "Why not Locke, who reassured you too? Why not Jack, or Kate, or Sawyer, whom we went to rescue?"

"Because it is your fault!"

"Why mine?"

"Because it was not just. It was not just that I should have been so happy while you were carrying Shannon's body back from the jungle. And now fate is punishing me because of you." She knew he did not understand her words. But in the furious working of her rattled mind, the explanation made absolute sense to her.

Now he did raise his hand to his cheek, and he felt the flesh there, and he shook his head in bewilderment. "What do you mean by fate?" he asked.

"Fate," she hissed.

"There is no fate," he said. "There is only choice and chance. No one is to blame for Jin's death. Not even _them_. Jin was gored by a wild boar before we could reach him. Do not look for someone to blame." 

Sun's breath came hard and fast. "Do not lecture me on placing blame." She turned on her heels and half-ran from the tent.


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter Four**

The time passed the way it had before her reconciliation with Jin made the days fly gloriously by. The hours crept, every day a month, the long week a year. Seven days of solitary mourning. Seven days of pitying glances. Seven days of hushed conversations, words dying the very moment she approached. Sun had tended the garden these past seven days, had tended it from daybreak to sunset, working her hands deep into the earth that recycled death into life.

As she molded a mound around a tender bud, she saw a hand, just a shade lighter than the dirt, rest beside hers. Sayid began to help her sculpt the mound. Kneeling beside her, he said, "Your garden is vibrant. It endures the scorching sun, the heavy rains. It survives."

"Because I entrust it to no one. Because I keep it myself."

"Sun, if there is anything I can do, anything at all--"

"You know as well as I that there is nothing anyone can do."

She was relieved that he did not press her further. He merely rose and left her to her plants. This she could control. This she could protect.

When Sun lifted the flap to Sayid's tent later that night, he jumped instantly to a sitting position. It was a hot night, and he was clad only in boxers, but he grabbed a nearby blanket hurriedly and draped it around his waist, not that she could see him clearly in the dim starlight that filtered its way in random rays through the canopy of the tent. "What are you doing here?" he asked.

"You said if there was anything you could do." Her words fell deliberately; she was never fully comfortable with the English, no matter how often or how well she spoke it. "Anything at all."

"Yes. What is it?"

She crossed her arms, grasped the ends of her shirt, and pulled it swiftly over her head. He stiffened with the instinct of a soldier responding to a threat. "What are you doing?"

She came and kneeled beside him on one side of his legs. "I want to forget," she said. "For just one night, for just one hour, for however long, I want to forget."

His eyes fluttered down reflexively to her naked chest and then quickly returned to her face. "You are crazed with grief," he said. "You are nothing like yourself. Go back to your tent."

Sun wrapped her leg suddenly around him, and he shifted to hide his purely primal response. She refused to consider how strange it was that, in the course of a week, she had gone from slapping him to straddling him. If he could not serve as a receptacle for her rage, perhaps he could release the pain some other way. "Don't you want to forget too, Sayid? Don't you want to lift that weight that bears down every second on your soul? _Every second._ Don't you want to kill that terrible pain, if even for a single night?"

The moonlight streaming through a vent above made deep pools of his dark eyes, or maybe it was the tears barely contained within them that created the effect. "Yes," he answered. "But not in some way that will bring more pain later. It would feel like adultery in the morning. You _know _it would."

Sun thought of past temptations, of the vow she had kept during the darkest hours of her marriage, of the promise she could never release, even when loving Jin meant sharing his dungeon. She choked on the idea of what she had almost done to purchase a passing peace.

She swung herself off of Sayid and abruptly pulled on her shirt. As the cotton covered her stomach, she let her hand linger there, where the child grew. She was not yet showing, and in her grief she had almost forgotten that she still kept this last remnant of Jin. She must guard it with her life.

Sitting on the sandy floor of the tent, Sun murmured through her quiet tears, "How can you manage to think ahead to tomorrow?"

"Because I am no longer in the place where you are now."

"Do you regret it, then?" she asked. "The way you beat that man when you were in that place?"

He did not answer.

"How many of them did Jin kill?" Perhaps his response would bring her some relief. The Others hadn't murdered Jin, but it was ultimately because of them her husband was dead. 

Sayid swallowed. To her, he seemed worried. "They were insane," he said. "All of them."

"What do you mean?"

"I interrogated several. They claimed to have come here many years ago, in their ship."

"So?" she asked. "Did not Danielle come here on a ship?"

"They said they came 200 years ago. On a space ship. From another world."

Her eyes widened. If she had been looking for a distraction, then this would suffice. The details of the rescue had not interested her before, but _this _she had not heard.

He glanced away and then looked back at her. "They wanted to study us. They _have _been studying us. They took Jack, Kate, and Sawyer to study them more closely."

"Why?"

"They said they wanted to save us."

Sun's eyes narrowed in the dim light. "Save us from what?"

"From ourselves, I suppose. They say that they took the children to teach them new powers, that they took Claire to engineer a new species in the womb. They said Walt was already one of them." Walt had disappeared with his father. The survivors did not know whether the pair was alive or dead. "They think they can communicate with their minds, that they can project their own images."

"And the four-toed statue?" Sun asked.

He nodded. "Yes, it belongs to them. It is an image of their…"

"Their god?"

"Not quite," he answered. "Their progenitor."

"Yet they all had five toes?" she asked, a little nervously.

"Yes." He smiled weakly. "They claim to have…evolved. The statue is a memorial to their advancement from primitive roots. They are mad. Cultish. Yet some of the children, who had been with them for years—Alex among them—had come to believe them."

Sun drew in her bottom lip between her teeth. "But you do not believe them."

"Of course not," he insisted. "The blood they bled was human enough."

"Then why do you look so afraid when you speak of them?"

She could not see his features clearly in the darkness, but his teeth seemed firmly clenched. "Have you heard the whispers?" he asked at length. "Have you seen the smoke? Walt?"

"No. I have heard of these things."

He drew his knees up, crossed his arms over them, and leaned forward. "Here is the strangest claim of all," he said. She waited anxiously. He seemed reluctant to continue, but at last he did. "They did not say, precisely, that their ship crashed on this island."

Her lips parted slightly in unspoken question.

"They said their ship is this island: a self-contained ecosystem. They say that is why we can never sail away. They control the current. They control the rain. They control it all. And at this very moment, we are not on earth, but somewhere in space. They have been intermitently gliding just above the earth's oceans, collecting specimens—planes, ships, people." He began to laugh, but it sounded contrived. "Do you ever wonder if we will all go insane?"

She smiled bitterly. "Sometimes I wonder if we already have." She looked at him curiously. "Locke, Sawyer, Jack—they know about what the Others believe?"

"More or less." He rubbed the knuckles of one hand and seemed to study them. 

Sun did not wish to ask him any further questions. It was all too strange. _Let the madness be buried there, back at the camp of the Others. Let us strive for normalcy here_, she thought, _on this small patch of shore we call home. _Her hand again found its way to her stomach; it wandered absently across the place where she could not yet feel Jin's child move. _Let us strengthen what remains. _

"Thank you," she said softly, "for…for resisting me."

Sayid nodded without looking at her.

Her hand still rested lightly above the baby. "It would have been an awful thing," she said.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw his lips twitch into a partial smile. "How you flatter me."

She felt herself begin to laugh at the unintended insult. She covered the outburst with her delicate hands. It seemed wrong to laugh so soon after Jin's death, but, then, wasn't relief what she had come seeking? She lowered her hands to the ground and pushed herself up. She permitted the smile to remain on her face, yielding to the short glimmer of serenity the moment brought.

Maybe there was hope after all. Whether on a ship or on an island of madmen, she was, at least, not quite alone.


End file.
